Letter to the Editor

Responsibility of parents, schools

Reading the “Parent's shouldn't indoctrinate children” letter dropped my IQ by 5 points. It is so full of logical fallacies that it would be impossible to address them all in a single letter of comparable length.

Let’s start with the assertion about the role of a parent. It is absolutely a parent’s job to teach their children as best they can their views on morality, politics, personal health choices, among other teachings. It might even be the most important role of a parent.

For the argument to be valid, one would have to start with the assumption nothing taught by a public education system counts as indoctrination, a completely ludicrous and laughable notion.

I also want to address the idea of what democracy is. The very definition of democracy is “people’s rule,” which means discourse cannot possibly be bad, but rather is the backbone of democracy. Allowing the opposition of ideas is essential to the health and longevity of a true democracy.

Mandates on healthcare have nothing at all to do with trust or understanding of science. They have everything to do with whether or not it is the role of government to make health-related decisions for the individual.

What is obvious to everyone with a thinking brain, however, is the left embraces authoritarianism whole-heartedly and cannot stand to see an individual making choices for themselves that are contrary to the left’s agenda.

What struck me most about the letter was the blatant hypocrisy in every line, pushing the writer’s ideologies while condemning the ideologies of others.

The writer should stop pretending their brand of indoctrination is anything other than that, because we see right through it.

Rebecca Jensen

– Ritzville